High speed serial communication is becoming more common with electronic systems and electronic components. For example, high speed serial interconnections may be used for input ports and output ports for integrated circuit devices to meet data transmission requirements of higher capacity chips that may be pin limited, such as systems on chip (SOCs) or application specific integrated circuits (ASICs). Other wired or cable applications of high speed serial communication is for system bus backplanes and communication network systems.
To facilitate data transmission over a serial interconnect or data link, a clock may be embedded into the serial data stream of data bits prior to transmission at a transmitting end. At the receiving end of the serial data link, clock and data are recovered from the received serial clock/data signal.
Some industry standards specify high speed serial communication links such as PCIe, CEI-6, XAUI (IEEE 802.3ae), SATA, and Fiber-channel. Data transfer rates for serial communication links may be at high data bit speeds such as in the range from 2.5 gigabits per second (Gb/s) to 20 Gb/s or more.